Since summer requires a vacation of some sort, I am taking this week off.
Everyone enjoy yourselves and stay safe!
I’ll be back next week.
Memories That Aren’t Mine—CoronoaLife Day 474
July 1, 2021 By Leave a Comment
I have been working this week on putting together photos for a family gathering we are having. As I go through these old photo albums, every picture is like an old friend. I remember the people in them, and the stories behind them…except that I don’t.
Some of these photos are from when my great-grandparents were young. They are my grandparents growing up. They are my father and his siblings as children. They are from when I was too young to have memories of those events.
Yet I remember them.
Not actually remember, of course. But I have been told many of the stories of these photos, and as the family historian I know who most of the people are and where and when they were taken.
The photos below, for instance, is of my grandfather giving me a stuffed rabbit at Easter. I don’t remember it. But I have been told about it enough to feel like I do.
My family lived in Germany at the time, and my grandparents flew over to visit. It was only the 2nd time they had seen me. Looking at the photos, I obviously was thrilled with the bunny, and my grandfather delighted in giving it to me.
My grandfather died when I was 3 years old. I have no actual memories of him. But I still have the rabbit, his well-loved ears floppy and his bright burnt-sienna coat faded closer to tan. And I have the picture, and those together connect me to a grandfather I never knew.
Every picture is a connection across time and space. I never saw my young grandmother in the play pictured in the album, but I was in the theater for many years and know how it felt. I never knew the house where my father and his siblings played with their cousins, but I remember playing with my cousins at family houses. I wasn’t at my grandmother’s graduation, but I have graduated. I was not there for these exact events, but the emotions are familiar, resonating down the years, weaving me into the tapestry of my family history.
As the family historian and a storyteller myself, every picture is a window into an entire world. I don’t know who will carry that world when I am gone. So far no one has stepped forward to pass the stories on to. Perhaps those stories will be consigned, as most of our memories are, to the dustbin of history.
But until then, their stories live, and the people in them live. The Egyptians believed that you never truly died until the last time someone mentioned your name. Maybe that’s what drives some people to want fame—a quest for a type of immortality.
I am not so arrogant to think that my family’s names will live forever. But for now, I am the keeper of the flame, and I am honored to hold their lives—and their memories—in my heart.
Summer Brain–CoronaLife Day 467
June 24, 2021 By Leave a Comment
A weird thing happened this week. My daughter ended school last Thursday…and my brain went on vacation.
I have been oddly unable to focus or scare up too much motivation this week, even after a decently productive week last week.
Some of it may be my change in sleep schedule–or lack thereof. With no need to get up for school, my daughter and I are sleeping in, making up for the sleep deficit we’ve been running on for months.
The advice is usually to keep to a regular schedule, and I expect that I will settle into a new sleep routine shortly, but right now it feels really nice to not have to get up at a certain time. To really SLEEP.
The last week and a half has been very social, too. Lots of people. As an introvert with more than a year of quarantine behind me, the sudden re-immersion in society has been stressful and exhausting.
So I am giving myself permission to let my brain be on vacation this week. Next week I will have to get back to reality.
School’s Out!—CoronaLife Day 460
June 17, 2021 By Leave a Comment
We have made it. Today is the last day of school. After this, we will be free of scanning, printing, posting, and Google- Meeting.
Remote learning is not for everyone. Many students struggled to stay engaged. My daughter was not one of those. She thrived academically. She had the best grades of her school career, and her standardized test scores were off the chart.
Socially was another story. Already shy and awkward, the isolation did not help. She really missed her friends, and even frequent phone calls just didn’t fill the void. As an only child, the lonliness was sometimes intense. When we swung by the school the other day, she yelled, “Mom, there’s people! Real people!”
Re-socializing next year should be fun.
But this year—this crazy, disorienting year—is finally over. We close that chapter and start another, this one a more-normal-than-last-summer summer vacation. My daughter is already wondering how she will fill her time, lamenting the loss of that everyday contact with her teacher and classmates.
We will find ways to fill the time, hopefully using the time to heal and rest from the enormously stressful school year. Hopefully there will be more outdoor get-togethers with her friends. Then she’ll be ready to dive back into regular school in September.
Will I be ready to get back to a real routine? To have enough time to myself to think, to breathe, to create? To finally start putting this pandemic behind us?
Time will tell. I hope so.
RIP, Aunt Nancy – CoronaLife 453
June 10, 2021 By 1 Comment
Last week we lost my Aunt Nancy. While her final passing was drawn out, her initial decline was quick and unexpected. After years of her health at a certain status quo, the slide caught us all off guard.
My Aunt Nancy was a fixture in my life. I have many memories of my family gathering at her house in Springfield. It had a tree in the backyard that was perfect for kids, with low-hanging umbrella branches and a very climbable trunk. I could scale it and stick my head out of the canopy and feel oh-so-tall. Her house was a ranch, and to a small child felt sprawling, with mysterious rooms around each corner.
Her house may have been mysterious, but it was always full of love and welcome. Family meant the world to my aunt. She positively glowed when we were all gathered in. When Aunt Nancy attained the rank of family matriarch after her mother and grandmother had passed, nothing pleased her more than having us all congregate at her house down the shore and eat and talk for hours.
Like most people, my aunt’s life was not always easy, and she kept regrets and disappointments locked in her heart. But her heart did not harden with them. Aunt Nancy was a generous soul, always ready to help the family. She was supportive of my genealogy efforts, and occasionally slipped me something to help defray the costs of my research. She treated my daughter kindly, too, asking her about herself, hanging up the pictures she drew for her, and giving her a pink bunny that my daughter took to bed with her the night we heard my aunt had died.
In a world where kindness and generosity are dwindling, where families are drifting apart in the hustle and bustle of life, my aunt stood firm in holding together her extended family. I do not know who will pick up the mantle, to wear with the same pride and love she did.
The mysterious house is now sold, the huge tree proven to be a dwarf variety, and my aunt has passed on. But her warm generosity and fierce love of family remain, a part of me always.
Rest in peace, Aunt Nancy. You have earned it.
The Lingering—CoronaLife Day 446
June 3, 2021 By 2 Comments
In any protracted illness that leads to death, there is a period I call The Lingering. It is that time between the moment all hope is lost and the actual time of death. The person is often non-responsive—alive, but with no life.
It is a peculiar time, The Lingering. A state of limbo that is excruciating. There is no turning back to a better time, yet there can be no moving on to true mourning, because the person is still with us.
A great struggle arises in you during The Lingering, as if two people have grabbed your arms and are pulling in opposite directions. Because you do not want your loved one to leave you—how desperately you want them to stay!—yet you want release from the pain of watching them waste away, of waiting for the end to their suffering. So you exist in this time between hope and grief.
The Lingering is timeless: minutes, hours, days all running together into one long moment of suspended life. There is only the room your loved one is in, a room full of expectant quiet, of emotion frozen in time, of people bound together in a web of waiting.
And then the change comes.
In one indefinable instant, The Lingering ends. The soul departs silently, but every person there knows immediately, without a word spoken. The spell breaks, time rushes in like a tidal wave, and your grief finds space, finds outlet. Your guilty relief at reaching the end sharpens the loss and heightens the love.
The Lingering is over. The Healing can begin.
Just Keep Swimming—CoronaLife Day 439
May 27, 2021 By Leave a Comment
I am now fully vaccinated, so I have ventured to places I have not been for a while. I spent 3 hours clothes shopping for my daughter last week (we won’t discuss how much I hate clothes shopping), and I also went inside the library for the first time in over a year!
My child, however, is not old enough to be vaccinated, so we still have to be careful where she is concerned. After much consideration of transmission rates in our state and area, and seeing the case rates falling, we have decided to let her go back to swimming classes at her pool. A tiny step toward normalcy.
This week was her first week back, and seeing her in the water (and rocking the breast stroke) was heart-warming. She was nervous about going back, being around so many people. But it was good for her, physically and mentally. It will help ease her into next school year, when she will be back in the classroom.
These small moves to normality are encouraging, and welcome, but we are not quite at the end of the tunnel yet. Caution and respect are still needed. We are almost there—just keep swimming.
The Non-Writing Part of Writing—CoronaLife Day 432
May 20, 2021 By Leave a Comment
This was one of those weeks where my other responsibilities fell on me hard, and I got very little done on any writing front. Although I hate weeks like that, they happen and I have to learn to roll with it.
People who are not writers think that if we are not getting words on the page, we are not writing. And while that may technically be true, that doesn’t mean we are not making some sort of writing progress.
As anyone who has followed this blog knows, I have been struggling with rewrites of my science fiction YA novel, Veritas. I’ve been chipping away at it, and feeling fairly happy with the new direction, but I have put it aside for now while I work on the non-fiction genealogy book. I am not in the right headspace to dive into fiction at the moment, so it is a good detour for me to take.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it. I sometimes get ideas that I hurry to jot down in the notes for when I return. And I recently have been enjoying K.M. Weiland’s blog series on archetypes, which is making me think differently about not just Veritas, but the structure of possible follow-on books in a series.
So, my subconscious has been chewing on Veritas while I’ve been away. And I am also re-thinking the first chapter of another project, this one middle grade, The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone. I really love this book, but it has not found a traditional home. My co-author and I are contemplating self-publishing it, but I feel that the first chapter is our issue. We get conflicting feedback about it—some feel it is confusing, others are just fine with it. I think if we can get that right, we might yet find it a traditional home.
I also have another project that is not even on a back burner, more like on the warming pan. It is the sequel to my published book, The Witch of Zal. The first draft is written, but it needs a good deal of editing. And I am in the process of getting a new cover and illustrations for Book 1, before I move on with publishing Book 2.
As you can see, I have been doing a lot of non-writing writing. Sometimes you can move forward even when you aren’t putting words on the page.
How are you advancing your writing these days?
Creating a Continuity Checklist—CoronaLife Day 425
May 13, 2021 By 1 Comment
I am working on my maternal line genealogy book, as most of you know. I had hoped to be a bit further on in this project by now, but other things came up this week that got in the way. Such is the life of a writer!
I didn’t get into the actual revisions as I had hoped, but I did get the checklist made up. When I write fiction, I am not a super-plotter, I lean more towards the pantser, but not totally. Nonfiction is a bit different, however. I used a Table of Contents to guide my initial writing, and at this point in the process I need to check for continuity. It would be foolish to try to do it all from memory. So I created a checklist in Excel. The first column lists all the chapters, and then the other columns are the things I need to check/fix/revise.
I have 14 chapters in the book, and 6 categories I need to check: Tense, Children, Cross-Lnking, Chapter Headings (& Subheadings), Chapter Title Pages, and Trees. Six categories doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? (*laughs hysterically*)
- Tense means checking that I have used past tense throughout the chapter. In most cases, I have not, so this is the category that will take the most time.
- Children is making sure I structured the children’s list for each chapter the same—did I use the same bullet points, did I include birth and death dates, did I highlight the direct ancestor child’s name only or name and dates?
- Cross-linking is where I mention someone from another lineage within the current lineage, so I then put in parentheses (see [Surname] Lineage). Usually this is at the end of the chapter, when a woman leaves her surname for her husband, or in a subheading under the female’s name. Sometimes, however, neighboring families appear in the same historical events, so I need to mention that someone from another family was also involved, and which chapter they can be found in.
- Chapter headings is pretty obvious. Did I use the same font, the same font size? Are the subheadings all the same? I also put the chapter name up in the header portion of the page. Did I actually do that? Are they all the same size, font, weight?
- Chapter title pages precede the actual chapter. I still am trying to design those. Something simple but readable. I’d like to use some sort of graphic or photo, but that’s what I am still stumped on.
- Family trees that also precede each chapter. I have most of them created, but I need to double-check them as for some families I now have more information on them than I had when I made the trees. And there are several chapters that I don’t have them done yet at all.
Once I get that done, I will compile all the chapters and work on the Indexes. I usually have three: Name, Place, and Cemetery. I know Word has a way to create indexes, because I used it for my father’s book, but I have long since forgotten how to do it and will need to re-teach myself.
That will all keep me busy for a while! I will keep you apprised of my progress.
How are your projects coming along?
Travel in the time of COVID—CoronaLife Day 488
This past week, my family traveled to North Carolina to visit family and attend my niece’s wedding.
The wedding was beautiful—full of love and fun, which is no surprise given that the happy couple are loving, warm, generous, fun people. Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves.
We had a great time at the wedding, and it was wonderful to visit with family we hadn’t seen since Christmas 2019.
But traveling with an unvaccinated child is fraught these days.
Rest stops were in and out fast. Meals on the road were eaten in the car. Hand washing and masks were a must.
North Carolina as a whole was only 38% vaccinated when we went down. The area we visited is likely below that average. At the wedding, only 3 people were masked—my immediate family.
So while we had an absolute blast at the wedding, I am hoping we don’t pay a high price. I am counting the days until we are past the 14-day incubation period.
We returned home to find our state’s case rate rising, the transmission rate at 1.08, and the dreaded Delta variant exploding.
I’m so sick of this.
Mask up. Maintain distancing. Get the vaccine. I don’t know about you, but I am ready for this to end. At the current rate of vaccination, we will not reach herd immunity until March 2022. A full 2 years after the world shut down.
Let’s kick this thing to the curb, so we can all breathe—and travel—freely again.